This disclosure relates generally to agricultural vehicle guidance systems, and more particularly to generating and implementing end-of-row turn paths for an agricultural vehicle.
Agricultural vehicles (e.g., tractors, harvesters, etc.) are commonly used in a variety of agricultural tasks (e.g., to tow planters or seeders for planting seeds, to tow spraying implements for applying fertilizer, for harvesting agricultural product, etc.). Traditionally, agricultural vehicles have been manually operated by the operator. That is, the steering and speed of an agricultural vehicle have been controlled by an operator driving the vehicle. Recent developments integrating GPS-based navigation systems into agricultural vehicle control systems have enabled automatic or semi-automatic steering modes. For example, some agricultural vehicles may include a control system configured to automatically direct the vehicle to follow a path between, over, or adjacent to rows in a field. For many such control systems, end-of-row turns are executed manually. For example, when the agricultural vehicle reaches the end of a first swath or row, the operator raises, turns off, or otherwise disengages the agricultural implement; the operator then manually controls the speed and steering of the agricultural vehicle to guide the vehicle through the end-of-row turn connecting the end of the first swath to the beginning of a second swath or row. The operator then lowers, turns on, or otherwise engages the agricultural implement and an automatic or semi-automatic control system guides the agricultural vehicle along the second path. The operator may not follow the most efficient path through the end-of-row turn. Small errors in heading or path through the end-of-row turn can lead to large corrections in heading and alignment while initiating automatic guidance at the beginning of a subsequent swath. Additionally, if the implement is not aligned with the subsequent swath at the time the implement is lowered or turned on, the implement may miss a portion of the subsequent swath, creating a skip, and/or overlap with another swath. Skips (e.g., missed sections of a swath) may result in weeds growing, time lost due to backing up and repositioning the vehicle, and/or time lost to filling in by hand. These errors and corrections may result in significantly reduced efficiency of agricultural operations.